


That Made Missing Men Dance Home

by eudaimon



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:05:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jackson was good at running until he decided to stop; Reid makes as good a home as any, for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Made Missing Men Dance Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shyday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shyday/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! <3

_Or maybe broken is the way we love._  
As if meeting someone else one soul  
searches  
the other for openings - ways to enter. 

 

He is not weak because his heart is heavy - it's a truth that takes some telling. Like Odysseus, he feels like he's been wandering in the goddamned wilderness and finally made it back, at last, only to find a country that he doesn't quite recognise. Everything is subtly different. His wife is taking other suitors. Somewhere in the distance, Troy is still burning.

The metaphor gets away from him. Lord knows, he does not have the will to chase it down.

The point: these days, he doesn't always know what Reid is thinking. He saw it in the army, often enough - these men who come back from the edge changed, quieter somehow. Serene. It was him who did it - him who cut the circle of bone out of Reid's skull, left him open to the air and unfinished for the first time since he was born. His hands were steady as stone. Fontanel, he remembers. It's affecting to think that a person starts off broken, and can come to heal and grow. Bone knits and makes us air-tight. We learn. We consolidate.

Or something like it, anyway.

At his side, Reid is snoring softly. The cane leans at the foot of the bed. The glasses (which Jackson still isn't sure that he needs) lie discarded on the nightstand. _One more day_ , thinks Jackson. _One more week, one more month. Hell - call it a year_. He was a man who had a talent for running until the day he stopped; that's true of Homer Jackson and, Lord knows, it was truer of Matthew Judge. Odysseus was always running towards home, while Matthew Judge was just trying to get the hell away. Women have always made it worse, somehow; he has no self control where they're concerned, so he does foolish things. Susan...Caitlin...his _wife_ left him carved open and bloody, his heart oddly shaped and not quite the right size for the cavity in his chest. Mimi makes him feel like he's always on the edge of falling; he staggers like a man drunk, trying to find purchase, never, ever feeling safe and, yeah, there was a time when that would have been exciting but, mostly, these days, he's just tired. 

This man, though. This man here.  
This man is a familiar shore, a bearing to aim for, a constellation to be guided by.

Or, at least, he was once. Now, Jackson feels like there must be a touch of pioneer in him - a whisper of the West which was never quite as wild as the stories made it sound but was always plenty wild enough for Jackson. He misses America sometimes, not the reality but the idea of it. The breadth of it, really. The space there was in which to run.

He wonders what kind of life they could have made there, if they'd arrived there like the first ones to discover a distant, thickly wooded shore. A cabin, maybe. By a lake. The rain off the mountains and the goddamn birds singing in the trees. A safe place for both of them, a million mile away from this shit-storm. They could have compared scars and seen how long it took to grow whole.

At his side, Reid stirs. Jackson reaches out with one hand and trails his fingers through the hair on Reid's chest. He presses his palm against Reid's heartbeat and lets his eyes drift close.

"Oh, Captain, my Captain," murmurs Reid and, even without looking at him, Jackson can hear the smile.  
"Whitman?" he says,lifting his head. "I wouldn't have pegged you as a Whitman man."  
"Are you the only one allowed to contain multitudes, I wonder?"

He's always liked being unknowable, but what he knows is this - that, somewhere in Reid's archive, there is a file marked 'HOMER JACKSON' and, somewhere else in that same archive, somewhere far separate, there's another marked 'MATTHEW JUDGE'. Caitlin knew Matthew ( _Oh, my love, oh my darling, oh my darling boy_ ) and, later, she knew Homer too, but maybe she never know as much about both of them together as Edmund Reid does.

As if by prior arrangement, they roll towards each other. Reid's hand grazes against the muscles of Jackson's arm. Neither of them are perfect; there's a scar on Jackson's shoulder to match the one under Reid's hair. Grey in Jackson's beard. Broken fingers. Broken ribs. He's had his share of pain. They both have.

Neither of them are young anymore, both of them caught somewhere between the cradle and knowing that neither of them are likely to make old bones.

They kiss. There's a tenderness to Reid's mouth, like his lips are sore. A raggedness to the edge of his thumbnail when it grazes against Jackson's skin. He's puzzling these days, like a mix between a thief-taker and a saint. He speaks in soft, measured tones, a touch of priest to him, but there's something of the wild to him, something of the lost. Jackson wants to hold onto him with both hands - wants to keep him anchored, keep him safe.

When he was casting around for a name, he chose Homer because there was a man who knew journeys and longing.

But he also understood how it was possible to eventually come home again.

Reid is bigger than Jackson, taller by several inches and, though weakness still lingers, he lets Reid roll him. He surrenders. He lets Reid break against him like a wave. With a knee on either side of Reid's body, Jackson cradles Reid's face in his hands. The first time he did this, he was little more than a boy, barely into his running days. This thing with Reid ain't forever - so little is - but it's something for now, something that they can both fall into. Girls have always meant one thing to Jackson, men decidedly another, but what he's always known is this - that sex is a language, is a ladder, and you climb it if you can.

"You dancin', Reid?" he says, grinning, shifting his hips very deliberately. Reid still gets lost in himself too often, locks himself into his archive and gets lost among the villains, the fuck-ups, the heroes. Jackson supposes that it's understandable, but, right now, he'd prefer something he can goddamn _feel_.

"I never took you for a dancer, Captain Jackson," says Reid, amused. And what he doesn't know is that Homer Jackson? Could dance with the best of them.

"Just fuck me, Reid. Feel something for a goddamn change."

They get lost in it, one movement at a time, in the brush of mouths and the sweaty-slip-slide of skin. Jackson's back pushes into an arch. His fingers knot in Reid's hair. For a thrust or two, he feels like a younger man. A man who hasn't come quite so far or left so much behind.

It almost feels like he could find Ithaca on a map again.


End file.
